Vladimir Bulat: Dear Erwin, I am writing these thoughts in haste, immediately after seeing the exhibition in the new art space, Arsmonitor, which has tucked itself away in the fateful Casa Presei in Bucharest. The exhibition you conceived and curated is dedicated to the painter Florin Mitroi — who was also our mentor in the course called, if I remember correctly, Techniques of Art, when we were students at the History of Arts department of the Bucharest Academy of Art. As far as I know, you had a closer relationship with the professor, and that openness allowed you a greater proximity to someone we would discover only after his death in 2002 to be more than a mentor and painter — a character. Do you consider Florin Mitroi a character par excellence?
Erwin Kessler: Florin Mitroi was a character. Perhaps the most interesting character in the Romanian art world. Precisely because he was not at all a character — he was completely hidden, apparently self-effacing, at first glance without any charisma: polite and deferential, always modestly dressed and never expansive, he seemed like someone who wanted to pass for nobody. He was the complete antipode of the typical figure of the artist, who presents himself as special through extravagant dress, flamboyant behavior, and an outsized personality. Most frequently, however, these supposedly exceptional artists produce absolutely ordinary, banal art. Mitroi was the inverse — he was invisible as a person and beyond visible as a body of work. And this in both senses — his work remained, in over 90% of its extent, completely unknown, revealed only after his death in 2002, not merely in its dimensions (over 10,000 works, not counting the photographs) but in its depth. This immense body of work, which plunged into the abyss without a safety net, had at its center a single self-devouring character — the artist, the eroto-thanatic persona FM (this was his signature, placed like a Z for Zorro on his works). (...)
